British newspaper: ‘The CIA has long history of killing world leaders’

“Some of the most notorious of the CIA’s operations to kill world leaders were those targeting the late Cuban president, Fidel Castro. Attempts ranged from snipers to imaginative plots worthy of spy movie fantasies, such as the famous exploding cigars and a poison-lined scuba-diving suit.”

CIA attempts to murder Castro failed, but since 1945 the US intelligence agency has succeeded in killing many leaders elsewhere around the world – “either directly or, more often, using sympathetic local military, locally hired criminals or pliant dissidents”.

According to North Korea’s ministry of state security, it accused the CIA  last year of an assassination attempt on its leader Kim Jong-un.

The attempt, according to the ministry, involved “the use of biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance” and the advantage of this was it “does not require access to the target (as) their lethal results will appear after six or 12 months”.

The Guardian noted that “such a claim cannot be dismissed as totally outlandish – given the long list of US involvement in coups and assassinations worldwide”.

They have engaged in anything from covert assassination to targeted killings, from aerial bombing of presidents to drone attacks on foreign leaders. Aerial bomb attempts on leaders included Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has escaped multiple assassination attempts, he told American filmmaker Oliver Stone in The Putin Interviews, a four-part documentary aired last year.

The director noted that “the first mode of assassination” is always to “try to get inside the security of the president.” Putin agreed but said he trusted his security.

Other leaders targeted for assassination included the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, president Sukarno of Indonesia and president Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

The US has developed “much more sophisticated methods” of assassination than Russia the Guardian boasted, especially in the fields of electronic and cyber warfare. “A leaked document obtained by WikiLeaks and released earlier this year showed the CIA in October 2014 looking at hacking into car control systems. That ability could potentially allow an agent to stage a car crash.”

The United States seems to be country where assassinations of leaders are commonplace, particularly when one considers that of the 44 presidents, including President Donald J. Trump, and four of them have died by gunfire while in office, while another six nearly perished in assassination attempts. That means 22 percent, almost one-quarter of them.

Of the fifteen US presidents and former presidents targeted, four were killed. There have been a total of four American presidents assassinated—three Republicans and one Democrat.

The three murdered Republicans are: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901.

The one slain Democrat was John F. Kennedy in 1963.